Distributed Systems Group

This paper describes the need for a self-organising Service Level Management (SLM) in future Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). Due to the complexity of SOA environments, self-management and self-organisation are fundamental requirements for an SLM architecture in this context. The SLM architecture presented consists of two types of autonomic managers. Autonomic managers on the service layer are responsible for enforcing quality of service constraints on a local level. These constraints are broken down from a global goal by an autonomic manager on the business process layer, which is responsible for distributing the quality of service requirements and for controlling the autonomic managers on the service level. We analyse the limitations of the current architecture, by discussing ongoing work concerning manager communication and collaboration based on principles adopted from the domain of organisational theory